Esther Perel says desire is “the ability to stay connected to oneself in the presence of another The beginning of desire is going out into the world to explore and discover. We must each patiently map the intersection of creativity, intimacy, connection and pleasure.”
I became intimate with desire by reading. Books speak to me. Similar to mosses and porcupines, the pages insist I listen in new ways at opportune times. A stillness allows words and white space in. Writing is a way for me to detox from gadgets and transmute all that keeps me estranged from the world.
Over the weekend I dug into two reads with wildly contrasting energy, Murakami’s newest and Give the Girl A Knife by Minnesota author and esteemed chef Amy Thielen. Murakami builds worlds full of solitude, slow detail and simple meals. Thielen shares her story about selling her soul for a job with culinary royalty in NYC at age 24. Both books paint pictures of extreme experiences. Place themselves at opposite ends of the peaceful to frenetic spectrum.
Queer romance and food, similarly powerful vehicles, have taught me to relish individual and universal flavors on a page+plate+body while I taste, give and receive. After a fast and furious, incredibly fun, end of winter love affair, I’ve noticed a craving to do intimate relationship like Slow Food or a seven hundred page novel. Local love and the steady reveal of character. Oh god, yes, luxurious. I want sustainable- to allow friendship to ripen into something physically, emotionally, spiritually, sexually grande in scope, allow lust to languidly form the rich humus of narrative arc and partnership.
What happens in those initial weeks of attraction. Damn! Dopamine for president. The first many months offer an exquisitely brewed drunken bliss. I don’t mean to sell the process of ecstatic creation short. Almost like flavor overload on the tongue + body lovers become spice salt sweet savory. Body umami.
In contrast, if the Midwest has taught me anything, it’s to slow and savor. Choose steady enjoyment and appreciation instead of immediate satisfaction or reaction. My childhood and early adult life equaled extreme experience after extreme experience. However, my values after I individuated were defined by simple and sustainable. Minnesota fits into my long-term unplanned plan.
Queer love shares similar flavors with my own writing and our northern Minnesota summers. We usually skip spring, seizure into summer when everything erupts. New leaves and shoots bust out into the world. Flowers are forced wide open. Water barrels down stream beds.
With pen, typewriter, computer, I throw a lot of material on the page. Want to get all that beautiful raw frenetic energy out- and then design my words so they’re universally appealing. I distill fermenting creative ideas through the process of crafting a poem, work of creative non-fiction or blog post. After more than a decade of building a creative life, I see my process and now understand timing, materials needed, and spaces that serve my craft best. Ultimately it’s the balance between absence and presence.
This too for food and love. Slow Love Lake Superior (SLLS) is what I call the approach to loving the people/places/practices I do ‘slowly and with quiet, steady pleasure’. SLLS is inspired by local Slow Food movement I learned about after bike touring in 2009. I spotted a flyer at my Duluth co-op the day I returned home about Slow Food Lake Superior’s book club. A coupling of my favorites. I attended in earnest two weeks later. As I talked compelling fictional characters and shared local cuisine, all my cells started to mellow after seven hundred miles of cycling down the west coast at break neck speeds.
The official Slow Food Manifesto reads, “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: fast life, which disrupts our practices, pervades the privacy of our homes, and forces us to eat fast foods. A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of fast life.”
Yes! A defense of quiet…pleasure also illuminates Slow Love. Similar to how writer Sara Ahmed speaks of queer use: how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. Present tense, vast possibility, poly friendly, wildly inclusive. Sustainable. Beyond ownership, or a culturally sanctioned way of linear, fast-paced, goal-oriented coupling, lets re-craft and queer style, sex, and language. Ask how and why do we use “wife, girlfriend, lover, partner, souse. Queering always queering, I use “This is a person/the people I am loving”.
I heard a local farmer exclaim once, “There is no cheap food. The price tag always has implications”. The Slow Food movement acknowledges the struggle to put a healthy, sustainable, affordable meal on the table for all. Slow Love Lake Superior echos “there’s no reason to sacrifice everything to the fast life”. SLLS makes space and time to ask the important and delicious questions. Allow contrast and wild expansion alongside others. Watching, changing, challenging expectations and assumptions of how to do relationship “right”.